PLO’s Arafat Falls Ill, Raising Fears for Health : Mideast: Chairman is reportedly exhausted from administering recent Palestinian self-rule. Aides dismiss ailment as a cold.

Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, fell ill after a meeting with a U.S. Senate delegation and spent much of Thursday in bed, raising fears for the health of the aging chairman who is said to be exhausted and ridden with stress.

The recent health alarms were raised about a week after Arafat checked into a Tunis military hospital for tests after a flare-up of a vertebrae condition that first erupted in 1979 and was aggravated by weeks of long hours and little sleep, his aides said.

Arafat’s top lieutenants sought to downplay the 64-year-old chairman’s current illness, which they described as “a cold” that set in Wednesday afternoon after Arafat spent a tiring day flying to Algeria, Mauritania and then meeting with a U.S. Senate delegation headed by Paul Simon, the Democrat from Illinois.

Arafat--who normally works until the wee hours of the morning, sleeps until 9 and then gets up for another day of work--instead went to bed after meeting the Americans. He did not get up again until Thursday evening, when he returned to his desk.

“It’s not true that he is seriously ill. He got a cold during our trip to Algeria and Mauritania, and he’s getting some rest today,” said Yasser Abed-Rabbo, one of Arafat’s senior advisers and an appointee to the new governing Palestinian Authority. “I’m sure by tonight he will be back in his office. It has nothing to do with his heart. It’s more like a sore throat.”

Arafat’s wife, Suha Tawil, had sought to quiet alarms about Arafat’s health when she spoke by telephone to CNN. Instead, she fanned the flames by saying he was “in bed with angina.” Later, her brother said she had meant the French word angine , by which she intended to say a sore throat.

Though his current condition does not appear serious, Arafat seems clearly to be feeling the strain of weeks of stress and overwork.

The debut of Palestinian self-rule in Jericho and the Gaza Strip has stepped up pressure on his administration in Tunis to begin providing services and paychecks to Palestinians at a time when international donor shortfalls have plunged the PLO into a cash crisis.

At his meeting with the American senators, Arafat looked “tired, pale and nervous,” according to one observer at the meeting.

Arafat aides said the vertebra flare-up that hospitalized him happened after the four-day holy Muslim feast of the Eid al Adha, when Arafat had an exhausting schedule of visiting a Palestinian orphanage, stopping at a cemetery for Palestinian dead in Tunis and, over the course of the weekend, kissing more than 1,000 well-wishers.

“Saying that he was in the hospital for five days is rumor-mongering. He made a usual medical checkup as any one of us might do,” one of his top lieutenants said.

He said Arafat first suffered the vertebrae condition in 1979, when he was attempting to mediate in the war between Iran and Iraq and had to wear a neck brace.

During the feast, the aide said, “he received more than 1,000 people who kissed him, each one of them put his hand around his neck, and the pain came back. Is he human or inhuman?

“You have to consider how many hours he works,” the aide added. “How many people he meets every day, how much stress he lives under, and everybody has to remember he’s not a machine, he’s a human, of blood and flesh. But he’s in very good condition.”

Concerns about Arafat’s health have lingered since he survived a plane crash in the Libyan desert in 1992. Some associates say his mental faculties have not been as sharp since the crash, although Arafat is fond of reciting facts and figures with amazing facility and joking that the crash turned his brain into “a computer.”

Last year, Arafat is said to have nearly lost his ability to speak the day before he checked into a hospital in Jordan for surgery on a blood clot stemming from injuries suffered in the plane crash.